About
Content
Store
Forum

Rebirth of Reason
War
People
Archives
Objectivism

Favorite EditSanction this itemThe Emergence of a Scientific Culture by Stephen Gaukroger
The Emergence of a Scientific CultureThe Emergence of a Scientific Culture
Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210–1685
Stephen Gaukroger (Oxford 2007)

From the back cover:
Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners.


The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development---and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.
From the Table of Contents:

1. Science and Modernity
     The Enlightenment Interpretation
     Scientific Autonomy
     Method and Legitimation
    
2. From Augustinian Synthesis to Aristotelian Amalgam
     The Augustinian Synthesis
     The Transition to a Scholastic Culture
     The Condemnations of Aristotle
     The Aristotelian Amalgam
     Competing Conceptions of Metaphysics

3. Renaissance Natural Philosophies
     Platonism as an Alternative to Scholasticism
     Naturalism and the Scope of Natural Philosophy
     Late Scholasticism

4. The Interpretation of Nature and the Origins of Physico-Theology
     First Causes
     Interpretation of Nature
     Hermeneutics
     Divine Transcendentalism versus Physico-Theology

5. Reconstructing Natural Philosophy
     The Problem of Discovery
     Speculative versus Productive Disciplines
     Hypotheses and the Physical Standing of Astronomy
6. Reconstructing the Natural Philosopher
     Speculative versus Productive Philosophers
     Officiis Philosophiae
     The Natural Philosopher versus the Enthusiast

7. The Aims of Enquiry
     Plato’s Cave versus the Elenchos
     Truth and Objectivity
     The Goals of Natural Philosophy

8. Corpuscularianism and the Rise of Mechanism
     Corpuscularianism and Atomism
     Gassendi and the Legitimacy of Atomism
     Beeckman and ‘Physico-Mathematics’
     Corpuscularianism and Mechanism: Hobbes
     Descartes’ Principia Philosophiae
     Cartesian Cosmology
     The Formation of the Earth

9. The Scope of Mechanism
     Primary and Secondary Qualities
     Biomechanics
     Natural Philosophy and Medicine

10. Experimental Natural Philosophy
     Natural History and Matter Theory
     The Focusing of Natural-Historical Enquiry: Gilbert versus Bacon
     The Air Pump: Hobbes versus Boyle
     The Production of Colour: Newton versus Descartes
     Accommodating the Explanans to the Explanandum
    
11. The Quantitative Transformation of Natural Philosophy
     Hydrostatics versus Kinematics
     The Quantification of Motion
     Mechanics as Kinematics
     Cosmic Disorder
     Dynamics

12. The Unity of Knowledge
     Common Causation
     Politico-Theology and Natural Philosophy
     Physico-Theology and Natural Philosophy
Added by Stephen Boydstun
on 11/15/2007, 6:34am

Discuss this Book (10 messages)